News: Tagged as FF Unit Slab

You may have heard that our Web FontFonts are now supported by 98% of all desktop browsers. With a tantalising typographical treasure trove of 2240 Web FontFonts, it’s sometimes tricky to decide which web font is the best fit for your online brand presence. To provide a little inspiration and help you choose, we’ve brought together a selection of in-use cases of our top ten most popular web fonts that have caught our eye recently.

The marvellous FF Meta andFF Meta Serif, Erik Spiekermann’s No-Brainer, feature on this great site Parse by How. Parse is a real smörgåsbord of design content; they scour the web to bring together what they call design ‘tapas for the brain’.

One of our bestsellers and a real classic typeface, FF DIN, features on the Budget 4 Change website. The thin horizontal strokes and fluent curves of FF DIN provide a sober and solid tone to the site which is dedicated to mapping, tracking and analyzing donor government budgets against official development assistance.

Evolution, Revolution, Solution. That is the simple philosophy behind Typolution, the ‘purely’ typographical website that covers the latest developments, innovations and advancements in the industry (all in German). The site uses our very own FF Unit for the body text and FF Unit Slab for the headers, offering a cool yet disciplined tone.

The website for the VRB (Vorratsgesellschaft) organization based in Germany is set in one of the bestselling and most serious text faces, the formidable FF Scala and FF Scala Sans. The VRB offers ‘off the’ Shelf Companies and legal advice.

Two Arms Inc are a team of two, who combine illustration and design in a delightful manner. Based in Brooklyn they are famed for their passion for screenprinting. Their website employs FF Dagny, by Örjan Nordling and Göran Söderström. Great minds think alike, as we use it on our site too!

We’ve recently received some lovely examples of FontFonts in-use. Keep ’em coming! If you’ve used a FF in a recent project and you’d like to be featured on our site, please email lucy@fontfont.de.

Aviva Stadium’s signage system is set in FontFont’s FF Unit typeface, designed by Erik Spiekermann and Christian Schwartz. Aviva Stadium hosts football and rugby matches, and is also a venue for concerts and other activities. Located in Dublin, Ireland, the stadium opened in 2010 and was designed by Populous in association with Scott Tallon Walker. The signage was designed by Populous Activate. We spoke with Alex Dale, a Senior Graphic Designer in their London office, to get more details about the project.

‘Before anything else, I wanted to use something that was inherently well-crafted’, Dale told us. ‘I wanted to avoid the safe signage choices, and select something a little more unusual and characterful. A unique building deserved a unique typeface. Overall, FF Unit lends itself to alphanumeric information systems – where numerals and letters are seen in isolation – for several reasons:

‘The medium weight is the ideal boldness to reverse out of a dark background, while having all the other weights is useful for things like maps, where you need to communicate lots of different levels of information .

‘The default overall fit (or letterspacing) works ‘right out of the box’, in that it's relatively loose compared to some other fonts. A pet peeve of mine is typography on signage set too tight, or not attended to at all.

‘The capitals are recognisable in isolation, which was really useful when it came to labelling the entrances. For instance, the ‘I’ has serifs top and bottom that disambiguate it from a ‘1’ or an ‘l’. Maybe not critical to the success of the system as a whole – people will find their door, eventually – but looking after these things communicates a broader concern for clarity and unambiguity. People pick up on these things and feel looked after.

‘The typeface includes gorgeous numerals, with tabular versions, which are ideal for setting number-heavy information.

‘The alternate glyphs, which we used on the prohibited items signage, let us set nice big, heavy, imposing titles quite tightly, like a proper newspaper headline.

‘FF Unit has arrows for all the weights, built right in! A godsend for directional information.

‘The characters are fairly tall and narrow, which suited the tall, narrow proportions of the signs. We wanted to minimise the footprint of the signs themselves, because pedestrian space is always at a premium in these kind of environments, while still being readable from a good distance.’

FF Unit is the grown-up, no-nonsense sister of Spiekermann’s FF Meta typeface. FF Unit has been extended with two companion families: FF Unit Slab and FF Unit Rounded. Spiekermann himself is no stranger to signage systems. During the early-1990s, he designed the reunified Berlin’s transit system signage, which uses the FF Transit typeface. FF Info was created for a redesign at the airport in Düsseldorf.

Every now and then we are asked for typefaces containing alternative characters – the first letter of the alphabet is especially interesting in this respect as the Latin script knows two forms of the lower case a: the double-storey a is one of the most distinctive letters in a typeface while the single-storey a is rather neutral and decent. So you can considerably change the character of a typeface by simply swapping just one letter.

Thanks to OpenType both forms can be contained in one font and the user can easily switch between the two forms (in applications that support OT layout features, like Adobe’s Creative Suite for instance). Many of the innovative FontFonts offer this opportunity:

First and main part of Yanone’s diptychon »Amman The FFilm« about the making of the FF Amman typeface for Jordan’s capital on occasion of its centennial celebrations in 2009.

Never officially commissioned as a custom typeface, it was rather a birthday present from Syntax and Yanone for Amman, and the perfect university graduation project for Yanone. In the end, the typeface with several typographic novelties has been widely used for all kinds of municipal services in Amman. The family consists of seven sans and four serif weights, each with their true Italics and both Latin and Arabic character sets. It is one of the largest bilingual families ever made, one of the few designed bilingually from scratch and the first containing true Arabic Italics.

FF DIN Round — This welcome addition to FontFont’s most popular family brings a softness to FF DIN’s simplicity and industrial sterility. FF DIN Round is more than a “search-and-replace” rounded version of its predecessor. Albert-Jan Pool and his team redrew each letterform to maintain the structure of the original. This ensures FF DIN and FF DIN Round will work well together in logos, slogans, price tags, etc. as compatible parts of advertising campaigns and corporate identities.

FF DIN Round is not only a good companion to FF DIN, its smooth and friendly curves make it work on its own for branding strategies for family cars, bikes, household appliances, sportswear, shoes, or medical products. It’s also very legible on screen.

FF Suhmo is inspired by classic Egyptian and typewriter fonts such as Courier and American Typewriter, which feature headline and text use. This impressive duality was Alex Rütten’s guideline for the concept of FF Suhmo. At the same time, many formal details were derived from the typical neon-lettering you can find on aged Italian restaurants in Germany. FF Suhmo has short ascenders and descenders and a generous x-height, making it a good choice for editorial design. It combines simplicity and functionality with playfulness, offering interesting details such as loops and swashes and a slight stroke contrast. Its varied details are unobtrusive in text sizes while developing character and sparkle in headlines.

FF Suhmo’s extensive character set includes numerous special characters and ligatures, several figure sets and small caps throughout all styles. The family consists of 4 weights: Light, Regular, Bold and Black, each with an Italic. The weights were staggered to complement each other within a layout, the Black corresponding to the Regular and the Light corresponding to the Bold weight, allowing words or phrases to be clearly stressed within a text. The Italics are lighter than the Roman and have a relatively slight angle of slope. The forms are derived from a manual writing process and often cross the base-line or the x-height.

BERLIN, GERMANY, July 2009 - FSI FontShop International announced the latest additions to its award-winning FontFont® typeface library.

The new FontFonts

FF Dagny™ — In 2002, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) changed from broadsheet to tabloid – a change that came along with a major impact on DN’s journalism, editing and design. Pangea design’s Creative Director, Örjan Nordling, had already worked with DN as a design consultant in 1996. In 2000, DN had been redesigned under the leadership of Dr. Mario Garcia. For the new design Nordling had created DN Bodoni exclusively for Dagens Nyheter. The change to tabloid called for a more compact setting and Pangea design was commissioned to produce a matching sans serif for Sweden’s largest daily newspaper. This became DN Grotesk which now has evolved into FF Dagny.

For the FontFont library Nordling and Göran Söderström made several adjustments, the contrast in stroke thickness was reduced for better legibility in small sizes and characters were redesigned together with the FontFont Type Department. The family now includes a range of consistent weights from Thin to Black making it perfect for use in body text and all kind of other applications. The name Dagny is an abbreviation of Dagens Nyheter as well as an old nordic female name meaning “new day”.

FF Duper™ — Martin Wenzel’s original idea from 1998 evolved into a kind of informal FF Profile in the end. The new FF Duper has a home-made touch, but provides of course all typographic qualities of a contemporary OpenType font. FF Duper consists of Regular, Bold, Regular Italic and Bold Italic weights, supports more than 60 languages, has several figure sets and fractions and includes alternative forms for a, g and y as well as a set of arrows, bullets and ornaments. And there is a special extra: All weights contain three versions of each glyph and via an OpenType feature the three alternatives are used in succession, treating vowels and consonents separately and recognizing even spaces between words for a lively and hand-made appearance of the typed text. Preliminary versions of the typeface have already been successful in education and school projects, but there are surely more areas where FF Duper perfectly fits in.

FF Kava™ started out as a free typeface called Kaffeesatz, published by Yanone in 2004 during the early stages of his type designing career. The bold weight was reminiscent of coffeehouse grotesk typefaces of the 1920s, while the lighter versions were supposed to bridge the gap to contemporary type design.

The current FF Kava family is a carefully revised, more rounded version of the old Kaffeesatz fonts. A black weight has been added as well as small caps and more figure sets to form now an attractive modern and soft sans serif type family.

FF Unit® Slab: When Kris Sowersby, Christian Schwartz and Erik Spiekermann were designing the parameters for FF Meta Serif, they spent quite some time on details like the thickness and the shape of the serifs – should the face veer towards a slab with blocky, heavy serifs or should it be more of a traditional book face? In the end, they went for a “normal” serif face with fairly solid serifs, but some thick-thin contrast and counters that aren’t totally parallel to the outside shape of the letters. Stronger and thus more useful than Times New Roman while not as constructed as Rockwell.